As pro-democracy protests hit central Moscow this summer, student vlogger Egor Zhukov promoted peaceful resistance to his 100,000 followers on Youtube. Violent clashes on the city’s streets — which have seen armour-clad, helmeted riot police pin down unarmed protesters on stone pavements as their colleagues beat their knees with batons — showed Russia’s security services doling out “political repression”, he said.
“Life is a struggle for power,” Mr Zhukov said in a video uploaded last week. “People with no power are fighting to have any at all. People who have any power are fighting for it to be absolute.”
A few hours after the video went live, police raided the 21-year-old’s apartment, interrogated him for five hours and dragged him off to court, where a judge sent him to jail facing charges of participating in “mass disturbances”. If convicted, he could spend up to eight years in prison.
“They’re picking up random people and offering no explanation of what they did in court. And they send them to jail,” said Sergei Smirnov, editor of Mediazona, an independent news site that covers Russia’s criminal justice system, in
a tweet. “Investigators are taking people hostage with the approval of the country’s political leaders.”
Not since 2012, when thousands of Muscovites took to the streets to protest against Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency, has Russia’s capital seen such a brutal crackdown on demonstrations as that witnessed during the past fortnight. Police trucks packed with young Russians and rows of baton-wielding troops have shown the brute force available to Mr Putin and his willingness to use it.
But the continued defiance from the tens of thousands who have taken to the streets this summer has underlined the depth of the disaffection at a 20-year-long regime that has failed to deliver economic growth or rising living standards for much of the past five years. And the dearth of ideas inside his administration to reverse its sliding popularity.
Portrayed in foreign capitals as a powerful and belligerent geopolitical actor whose military interventions have given him increased global clout, Mr Putin’s domestic support is foundering — down a third since 2017 — after years of economic malaise that have left average Russians feeling poorer and less confident about their future. Real incomes have fallen for five of the past six years, and are about 10 per cent lower than in 2013.
